Tapped: The Prospect Group Blog

A complicated political brawl in West Virginia came to a head Friday when the state’s highest court issued a ruling that all but ensures the passage of so-called right-to-work legislation there. The bill would ban unions in the private sector from requiring membership or dues as a condition of employment.

In its ruling Friday, the state supreme court ordered Governor Earl Ray Tomblin to appoint a Republican to fill a key state senate vacancy. The ruling concludes one chapter in a drama triggered by state senator Daniel Hall’s decision in the middle of the term to switch parties from Democrat to Republican, only to resign earlier this month. The state high court’s ruling essentially cements the GOP’s one-seat, veto-proof majority in the state senate.

The decision disappointed Democrats and the state’s labor unions, who had been relying on the state Supreme Court as their last chance to stop Republicans’ legislative push to pass right-to-work legislation, which labor allies say is merely an attack on unions. Last week the state Senate passed right-to-work legislation along party lines, and the Republican-controlled House is poised to vote on and presumably approve the bill in short order.

The political push to make West Virginia a right-to-work state comes at a perilous time for the national labor movement as the United States Supreme Court is considering a case that would ban public sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from non-members, creating a potential for the right-to-work movement to spread into government employment. Court-watchers widely anticipate that the bench will rule against unions.

Though Governor Tomblin, a Democrat, has threatened to veto the bill, Republicans only need a simple majority in both chambers to override that veto. If the Supreme Court had ruled to give Democrats the authority to fill Hall’s vacant seat, Democrats could have then killed an override attempt in the state senate, and could have stopped right-to-work from becoming law.

Seizing on the political opportunity, Republicans have made right-to-work a top priority in the current legislative session, arguing that the law would be a boon for business and for employment growth. The policy push has been aided by a “who’s who” of the conservative right: the state’s Chamber of Commerce, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Heritage Foundation.

However, multiple liberal-leaning economic groups have discreditedresearch the GOP and its allies have used to push the bill, pointing to faulty methodology and to the impossibility of singling out the impact of right-to-work on state economies.

“No matter how many studies you look at, there’s nothing that proves being a right to work state attracts employers,” Ken Hall, general secretary and treasurer of the Teamsters Union, told the Register-Herald. “This is not an issue that is good for West Virginia. This is absolutely, clearly being promoted by out-of-state interests, wealthy people and corporations to increase their profit.”

Republicans counter that right-to-work laws stimulate the economy. “States that have passed [right-to-work] have signaled to potential employers that they want job growth in their state and [West Virginia] is in no position to turn away this growth,” the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce said. “New and innovative policies are necessary to compete in today’s job market and if [right-to-work] has an impact, we need to pass it.”

If West Virginia Republicans succeed, the state will become the 26th in the nation to sanction right-to-work laws—meaning that more than half the nation’s legislatures have embraced anti-union policies.

Independent senator and Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders has launched a tour of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), in an apparent bid to reach out to young black voters who so far favor Hillary Clinton in the polls.

In visiting HBCUs, Sanders is casting the spotlight on institutions that have given black students, who have been protesting racial discrimination on campuses across the country, a vital safe space. As Darrick Hamilton wrote in the Fall 2015 issue of TheAmerican Prospect, HBCUs provide “safe and nurturing spaces for thousands of students,” but “are at risk of extinction” due to fiscal shortfalls.

After facing criticism from black voters that Sanders has a racial injustice blind spot, the campaign took drastic action last August by releasing a lengthy and detailed racial justice policy platform. “It is an outrage that in these early years of the 21st century we are seeing intolerable acts of violence being perpetrated by police and racist acts of terrorism by white supremacists,” it reads.

Sanders’s education platform, which calls for tuition-free and debt-free colleges, appears tailor-made to draw support from college students and may also resonate particularly with black students at severely underfunded HBCUs. Despite gains in wealth, employment, and education, the racial wealth gap persists, making college affordability a big problem within the black community, as Hamilton explains in the Prospect.

Because young college students played a crucial role in helping elect and re-elect President Barack Obama, it’s little wonder that the Sanders campaign has selected HBCUs for his next campaign tour.

HBCUs still matter to black students, notes Hamilton in the Prospect: “Given ... the ongoing societal presumption of black inferiority maintained by many college faculty and administrators, HBCUs have not outlived their purpose—indeed, their need calls for greater strengthening.”

The latest group to join the chorus of those demanding an end to the recent raids is a coalition of three-dozen lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender groups, which sent a letter Thursday to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. Johnson has said that “enforcement operations such as these will continue to occur as appropriate.” Two days of raids were carried out the first weekend of January and resulted so far in the detention of more than 120 people, most of them from Central America.

The negative impacts of the raids “are even more harrowing for LGBTQ immigrants that already report higher levels of violence and discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity,” stated the letter, which was signed by the Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal, and Pride at Work, among others.

Earlier this week, nearly 150 House Democrats also sent a letter to the Obama administration, urging the president to stop the deportations and to “start working towards a solution that provides a practical and humane response to the mothers and children from Central America fleeing for their lives.”

The administration has defended the raids and deportations as necessary to deter an uptick in illegal border crossings in the months prior to the raids. Administration officials say the focus of the operations has been on immigrants who had “exhausted appropriate legal remedies” and have already been ordered to leave the country.

The dispute between Obama and members of his own party over immigration raids has also spilled over onto the presidential campaign trail. Senator Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley both condemned the raids last week, and Hillary Rodham Clinton chimed in on Monday, saying “the raids have sown fear and division in immigrant communities across the country.”

But the administration can at least count on support for its actions from the Republican candidates: After the plans for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were leaked to the press late in December, Donald Trump tweeted, “Wow, because of the pressure put on by me, ICE TO LAUNCH LARGE SCALE DEPORTATION RAIDS. It’s about time!”

As Senator Bernie Sanders’s polling numbers surge in Iowa and New Hampshire, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is going on the offensive.

Clinton is attempting to spin Sanders’s longtime support for a single-payer health-care system as a radical idea that would harm the middle class—and one that has no realistic funding source. And it’s quickly turning into the fiercest debate between the two candidates in a primary that so far has been short on drama.

Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, accused Sanders of wanting to do away Medicare and Medicaid, which she said would “strip millions and millions of people of their health insurance.” That’s a stretch, given that a single-payer system would actually expand those programs to all Americans.

Clinton’s top staffers have also blasted Sanders for not specifying how much he would spend on such a plan, which is estimated to cost as much as $15 trillion.

The Clinton camp's choice of single-payer as its main line of attack on Sanders has prompted some Democrats to cry hypocrisy. They point back to 2008, when Clinton assailed Barack Obama for attacking her on single-payer. "Since when do Democrats attack one another on universal health care?" she asked at the time.

On Sunday, January 10, in Manchester, New Hampshire, Planned Parenthood Action Fund will formally endorse Hillary Clinton for president—its first-ever primary endorsement. Planned Parenthood says it plans to spend at least $20 million on this election.

“We're proud to endorse Hillary Clinton for President of the United States,” said Richards in a statement. “No other candidate in our nation’s history has demonstrated such a strong commitment to women or such a clear record on behalf of women’s health and rights. This is about so much more than Planned Parenthood. Health care for an entire generation is at stake."

Clinton, Richards, and Planned Parenthood took to Twitter after news of the forthcoming endorsement was released:

.@HillaryClinton Proud to support a lifelong champion for women's health. See you in NH. Talk soon to coordinate pantsuits? Too much?

Reproductive rights are set to be a major issue in this next election. Just this week, House Republicans voted yet again to defund Planned Parenthood, in large part because they are hoping Obama’s inevitable veto will galvanize anti-abortion voters on the campaign trail. Last year was a rocky one for Planned Parenthood, which sustained months of attacks after a conservative group accused the abortion provider of illegally profiting off of fetal tissue, a charge Planned Parenthood denied.

For years, one of the federal obstacles that has most frustrated gun safety advocates is an old prohibition on gun violence research. Without robust data on the impact of guns, safety advocates say, policymakers are unable to respond effectively to the epidemic of gun violence plaguing the nation.

On Tuesday, President Obama issued an executive order that not only tackles that problem head on but also reforms and expands background checks on firearm sales and commits $500 million towards increasing mental health access. Most importantly, the order directs the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and Justice to develop and increase research into gun safety technology.

Prior to this executive order, Congress had stymied effective gun violence research. In 1996, Arkansas Republican Jay Dickey (who has since reversed his position) added a rider to a budget bill that stripped the Centers for Disease Control of its funding for gun violence research. After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Obama ordered the CDC to begin researching gun violence prevention, but the agency still lacked funding and remained fearful of a backlash from Congress.

The research component of the new executive order bypasses the CDC by assigning those three federal departments the task of researching safety technology. These new technologies aim to minimize accidental discharges and trace lost or stolen guns.

After Obama’s emotional speech on his executive orders, Republicans were quick to weigh in. “No matter what President Obama says, his word does not trump the Second Amendment,” said Speaker Paul Ryan in a statement. “We will conduct vigilant oversight. His executive order will no doubt be challenged in the courts.”

Though Congress seems poised to fight Obama on gun control, advocates applauded the move. But, without Congress pushing for the CDC to research the gun violence epidemic, Obama’s order directing the three departments to research safety technologies can only go so far.

According to Ted Alcorn, the research director at Everytown—a nonprofit organization aimed at ending gun violence—researching gun violence is of life-and-death importance. “We won’t identify and implement measures that put a true dent in our country’s extraordinary rate of gun deaths,” he told The American Prospect, “without broad, sustained investment in research.”

In a last-ditch effort, House Republicans are set to vote Wednesday on a bill that would include a provision to defund Planned Parenthood. The vote comes just weeks after Congress passed its $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that included no cuts to Planned Parenthood, despite months of conservative pledges to defund the abortion provider.

House Republicans expect that President Barack Obama would veto any bill they pass. But they also hope that such a veto—which would come just days before Obama’s final State of the Union address—would elevate abortion issues on the campaign trail and galvanize Republican primary voters more broadly. As Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, explained in The New York Times, this bill would be a way to show voters that there is “a pathway” to defunding Planned Parenthood, so long as a pro-life leader is elected to the White House.

In statement issued on Monday, Dawn Laguens, the vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said it is “appalling” that Republicans are looking to roll back women’s access to preventative health care in their first week back in session. She notes this will be the 114th Congress’s 20th vote to cut women’s access to reproductive care.

According to conservative activists, today’s House vote against Planned Parenthood will likely be the last one we see until the presidential election is over. There will still be Congressional hearings about fetal tissue donation throughout 2016, and the Supreme Court will be ruling on the most high-stakes abortion-rights case in a generation, so Planned Parenthood will no doubt continue to make headlines this year.

But Republicans attacks on Planned Parenthood could backfire on the GOP. No fewer than 14 recent national polls demonstrate strong, majority support for Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights. In swing states, too, pollsters found that the majority of voters strongly support Planned Parenthood. By a two-to-one margin, voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire said they were less likely to vote to re-elect their senators if they voted to defund the organization.

A spate of student protests over racial discrimination on college campuses this fall and winter has triggered a backlash from critics who cast student demands as an affront to free speech.

But a dustup this week over legislation introduced in the Missouri legislature suggests that students’ own First Amendment protections may be at risk. On Wednesday, Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin, a Republican, withdrew proposed legislation that had sought to revoke the scholarships of student athletes who boycotted campus games.

A controversial figure whose previous bills include a plan to restrict what items could be purchased using food stamps, Brattin introduced the bill with state Representative Kurt Bahr, another Republican. Pre-filed while the legislature was out of session as H.B. 1743 last week, the bill demanded that “any college athlete on scholarship who refuses to play for a reason unrelated to health shall have his or her scholarship revoked,” and called for fines to be issued against “any member of coaching staff” who supported or otherwise enabled an athlete’s decision to go on strike.

Brattin’s bill was immediately assailed by legal experts and activists alike, who called it a violation of students’ First Amendment rights.

“Rep. Brattin’s proposed law is not only a thinly-veiled attempt at keeping black athletes in line, it is also a violation of Missouri’s own constitution,” wrote lawyer and former Las Vegas Sun reporter Steve Silver in a blog post on Monday. “Revoking a scholarship if an athlete elects to strike as a form of protest certainly seems like a strong way of the government impairing speech.”

Brattin isn’t the only public official who stands accused this week of trampling on student activists’ free speech. In the wake of unrest in Baltimore following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, City Public Schools CEO Gregory Thornton has taken what some call draconian steps to prevent violence as the six officers charged with Gray’s death go on trial. (The first of those trials ended in a hung jury Wednesday.)

As the city anxiously awaited the trial’s outcome earlier this week, Thornton sent a letter home to parents that spelled out school administrators’ expectations for students in the days following the jury’s ruling.

As reported by the Washington Post, Thornton’s letter stated that “student walkouts, vandalism, civil disorder, and any form of violence are not acceptable under any circumstances.” This quickly drew the ire of civil-rights activists who accused Thornton of attempting to silence students under the guise of safety and security.

“This letter offensively and dangerously conflates the productive and affirming acts of students with criminal acts that not at all contributed to the advancement of our city,” said a Facebook post by the student group City Bloc, which has been active in organizing student protests at the Baltimore City Hall and around the city. “We will no longer tolerate this constant criminalization of our voices.”

The controversy spotlights an intensifying national debate between students protesting unfair treatment and discrimination, and a growing chorus of politicians, media pundits, and school administrators who have taken to categorizing their actions as disruptive and dangerous. The clash over civil rights versus free speech echoes some GOP politicians’ attempts to demonize the Black Lives Matter movement as an instigator of violence and crime.

It’s a familiar pattern when civil-rights activists speak up, wrote journalist Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker last month.

“The default for avoiding discussion of racism,” wrote Cobb, “is to invoke a separate principle, one with which few would disagree in the abstract—free speech, respectful participation in class—as the counterpoint to the violation of principles relating to civil rights.”

There’s nothing business-friendly Republicans won’t try in their effort to dismantle organized labor. The recent budget showdown was no exception. However, rather surprisingly, organized labor avoided a shellacking.

“We’re relieved,” says Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO’s director of government affairs. “There was a whole laundry list of rollbacks on worker rights and to the [Department of Labor], and I have to say, we were expecting we wouldn’t be able to stop all of them. All in all, we dodged a bullet.”

Apart from an expansion of the H2-B worker visa program, which will increase the number of foreign workers employed in the U.S., congressional Democrats were able to use their negotiating leverage to beat back nearly all the provisions aimed at workers and organized labor.

After the National Labor Relations Board passed its landmark joint-employer standard a few months ago, which designated parent companies (like McDonald’s) just as responsible for employee-related issues as their franchisees, Republicans went on a crusade to overturn the ruling. A number of GOP members tried to pass a budget rider to defund the NLRB’s ability to enforce the ruling. (Any provisions attached to the budget require just a simple majority in the Senate rather than the 60-vote threshold that all other legislation must surmount.)

Despite intense lobbying on Capitol Hill from groups like the International Franchise Association, Democrats were able to detach the rider from the final budget deal. With little chance of a freestanding legislative repeal getting through the Senate or sustaining a (near-guaranteed) presidential veto, there now are few options to thwart the new standard.

Democrats also killed a rider that would have defunded the Department of Labor’s enforcement power of the fiduciary rule, a labor-backed consumer protection that protects retirement investments.

Additionally, Republicans failed in their attempts to roll back support for the Department of Labor as a whole—as Politico notes, the department’s funding levels actually increased by a small amount and funding for its enforcement agencies remains the same as in 2015.

Meanwhile, as the labor movement continues to fight the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, also spared from budget slashes were government agencies at both the Commerce and Labor Departments that would be responsible for international trade enforcement and compliance.

“The [Department of Commerce’s] Office of Enforcement and Compliance has investigated a historic number of trade cases in recent years, and it’s time they had the resources to continue this important function,” Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said in a statement. “This bill gives the OEC a funding boost that will ensure that U.S. industries and manufacturers aren’t left waiting for trade enforcement relief.”

Republicans were able, however, to quadruple the controversial H2-B guest-worker visa program, which labor officials say exploits migrants workers and takes jobs from Americans. Buzzfeed recently ran a huge investigation detailing the exploitive nature of the program and impacts it has on workers.

Labor may have dodged most of the bullets in the budget deal, but don’t expect labor’s agenda to see much future success—like raising the minimum wage or mandating paid sick days and family leave—so long as there’s a Republican-controlled Congress. “It’s going to be pretty difficult to build on this,” Samuels says.

Earlier this month the Chicago Police Department joined a growing list of law enforcement agencies around the nation under investigation by the Department of Justice for possible civil rights violations.

The announcement of the Justice probe came on the heels of the November release of a video showing white Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shooting and killing 17-year-old LaQuan McDonald on October 21, 2014. The Chicago Police Department spent more than a year trying to cover up the shooting. But with the video’s release, Van Dyke is being charged with murder.

Though activists have cheered the Justice Department’s announcement, such investigations can only go so far. Overhauling the nation’s second largest police department will be no easy feat, civil rights advocates say. “The big challenge is going to be the culture within the department and the culture of silence and lying,” says Tracy Siska, executive director of the Chicago Justice Project.

Despite conducting a string of investigations the last two decades, Justice officials have yet to take any concrete action. The Department of Justice began investigating law enforcement agencies accused of violating civil rights after the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 granted the agency the power to do so.

Since then, only a handful of police departments have been investigated, including those in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. Despite thorough investigations, complaints about each of these departments have persisted.

The Los Angeles Police Department became the first agency to be investigated by the Justice Department after the widely televised 1991 beating of Rodney King by four white police officers, which triggered riots in L.A.

The department had been plagued with complaints of corruption and misconduct for years and the resulting settlement required federal oversight of the department and a database with information on use of force, officer-involved shootings, complaints, arrest reports, and citations.

However, according to the The GuardianUS’s project The Counted, which counts the number of people killed by police, LAPD has killed 20 people this year—more than any other police department.

Since its creation in 1835, the Chicago Police Department has been embroiled in dozens of scandals and allegations of abuse. In the wake of the Lynch’s announcement, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel offered a rare apology and promised change, but Chicagoans have been promised reform before, to no avail.

“There’s no doubt that this is an organization that’s resistant to change,” says the University of Chicago Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project’s founder Craig Futterman. But he stresses that community involvement is necessary if the Chicago Police Department is truly going to change. “If folks who are most deeply impacted are excluded from the process, they may not actually get to the core nature of the problem.”

Still, with or without community involvement, spurring reform from a DOJ investigation will be a herculean task. In Cleveland, a department with 1,500 officers took 18 months to complete. Chicago’s force is almost ten times that size with 12,000 officers.

One reason the Department of Justice has investigated so few police departments is a lack of resources. An investigation could be lengthy as well as extremely costly.

Like other urban police departments, the Chicago Police Department has been accused of excessive force, corruption, misconduct, brutality, racial profiling, and more.

A 2014 report by the We Charge Genocide coalition, a Chicago-based grassroots initiative, highlights some of the department’s brutality with cold statistics. Black Chicagoans, for example, are ten times more like to be shot by a police officer than white city residents. The report found that out of 1,509 excessive force complaints, only 2 percent resulted in any kind of penalty.

It’s an open question whether this latest Justice Department action will lead to changes in Chicago policing. In 2004, the Cleveland Police Department agreed to reforms after a DOJ investigation. Eight years later white police officer Michael Brelo fired 137 bullets into a car occupied by two unarmed black people.

The Brelo shooting caused the Department of Justice to launch another investigation into the patterns and practices of the department and release its findings a few weeks after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a white police officer while playing in a park with a toy gun. The Cleveland Police Department agreed to another settlement with the Justice Department in May.

The Justice Department investigation announcement has drawn ambivalent reactions in the civil rights community. Some voice optimism that the probe will lead to reforms. Others aren’t so sure. “I think between the police union and the rank-and-file officers and management there will be obstruction at every level,” says Siska.